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Plocmstart writes "Here's what EETimes.com is claiming to be the first teardown of the A4 processor. 'Apple's iPad chip is a single-core ARM A8 made by Samsung. Through various benchmarking testing, UBM TechInsights was able to find out the details of the A4 processor.'"

Slashdot broke my mod points somehow, but this deserves to be modded to plus infinity. However, as anyone who saw the iPhone OS 4.0 presentation knows, there will be plenty of ads on the iPad too soon enough.

Ah, yes. I once accidentally reversed the 5 V and 12 V leads on a harddrive and saw the magical blue smoke escape from controller chip. Electronics work only so long as that smoke stays inside the chips! (I wonder how they get in it in there in the factories...)

So, basically, you are saying that anon trolls are insecure children who see everything in direct proportion to their "minuscule" pens size?
Thank you, I know understand the driving force of trolls. Explains a great deal really.

Wait, I thought all "Apple fans" were mindless sheep who thought their Apple products were magical white shiny boxes powered by unicorn farts. Why would they know the difference between an ARM A8 and A9?

Or are you saying that Apple fans do actually have some discerning knowledge about the hardware they use?

Weak chip? The intent was good performance and good battery life. The iPad gets ~10 hours on a single charge and nothing about the iPad feels sluggish. A lot of this has to do with a very optimized software stack (xnu + darwin + cocoa touch ui layer) with apps written in Objective-C (managed memory instead of garbage collection, natively compiled). It is quite a bit more efficient than even Android's optimized software stack, which runs apps on a stripped down JVM. There's more to building a responsive syst

It does have Neon [arm.com] but no powerpc. Strange that this information did not came from someone with a compiler. Does apple withhold information what code can be generated? Are devs so spooked by the apps license?

The only officially approved code generation method for the iPad is to send a nicely worded letter to Apple, along with X dollars. In Y months your app will be compiled for you and put up on the app store, for which you'll receive no royalties.

It's a given. All electronic components operate via the Magic Smoke they contain. That's why it's such a big concern when see smoke rising from a device--once the Magic Smoke has leaked out, they stop working.

Even something as "simple" as a car--ask your average person about how their car runs and they'll probably be able to tell you that the engine uses gasoline and that's pretty much it. You put the key in the ignition, turn it, and the magical transportation fairies start working.

A big part of this is due to specialization. Most folks have some particular thing that they're good at/focused on. But ask for details about how something works that's outs

I played with a Ben NanoNote at FOSDEM and, while it's an amazing device, it's nothing like the iPad. The screen is really tiny - only 320x200 pixels, which is not enough even for most terminal apps (40x15 characters), let alone graphical apps. The keyboard is really tiny too and it has a very slow CPU and little RAM.

The strength of the NanoNote is that it really is tiny. It's smaller than a typical wallet - you could slip it into your trouser pockets and take it everywhere. Running a web browser on it

They show that power usage is:0.5 Watts at idle with the display disconnected1.75 Watts at idle with display at min brightness4.25 Watts at idle with display at max brightness

They estimate that the A4 CPU uses 0.5 to 0.8 Watts when browsing the web over WiFi.

Conclusion, FTA:

Until display technologies make big moves downward in power consumption the consumer experience of battery life may be driven as much or more by the LED drivers, opto-mechanical design of the back-lighting, display settings and wireless connectivity employed versus the CPU itself.

With further analysis, including chip-level reverse engineering, we may be able to identify whether innovations such as Intrinsity’s patented cell libraries were used to optimize the critical paths in the ARM core itself.

I think we can all agree that the iPad isn't magical. I've got one and it doesn't support any kind of magical function that I can find. But the claim that it's revolutionary or world-changing seems to gain some support from the subject of this article. If it's nothing special, why is a detailed analysis of its CPU important or interesting?

And this is assuming the memory technologies / clock speeds did not change. If they also increased the memory clock, the bandwidth increase could be 3x or more. And since rich web media craves memory, bandwidth is a key li

There's a huge flaw in that Arstechnica artical: they are using Safari to benchmark. Who's to say that Safari itself hasn't been optimised for the iPad? They should have tested using a custom benchmark app.